that, had he not learned self-restraint, his temper would have
been savage. This discipline he acquired. The task was not easy,
but in time he was able to say with truth, "I have no
resentments," and his self-control became so perfect as to be
almost uncanny.

The assumption that Washington fought against an England grown
decadent is not justified. To admit this would be to make his
task seem lighter than it really was. No doubt many of the rich
aristocracy spent idle days of pleasure-seeking with the
comfortable conviction that they could discharge their duties to
society by merely existing, since their luxury made work and the
more they indulged themselves the more happy and profitable
employment would their many dependents enjoy. The eighteenth
century was, however, a wonderful epoch in England. Agriculture
became a new thing under the leadership of great landowners like
Lord Townshend and Coke of Norfolk. Already was abroad in society
a divine discontent at existing abuses. It brought Warren
Hastings to trial on the charge of plundering India. It attacked
slavery, the cruelty of the criminal law, which sent children to
execution for the theft of a few pennies, the brutality of the
prisons, the torpid indifference of the church to the needs of
the masses. New inventions were beginning the age of machinery.
The reform of Parliament, votes for the toiling masses, and a
thousand other improvements were being urged. It was a vigorous,
rich, and arrogant England which Washington confronted.

It is sometimes said of Washington that he was an English country
gentleman. A gentleman he was, but with an experience and
training quite unlike that of a gentleman in England. The young